I’m Indigenous Canadian and my parents were victims of the Residential School system in Canada in the 50s, 60s … residential ‘schools’ which were literal torture centers for Indigenous children run by Christian organizations.

From my point of view … Christian religion is bad as a whole.

And just like everything in the Bible, they take a grain of truth and turn it into a multimillion dollar pyramid scheme … or they use it as a weapon to go after people and groups they don’t like.

Personally I’m non religious, I think they’re all nuts. The origins of these religions might have started out with some noble goals that might have been for the good of humanity … but now it’s just a system of power, money and control to manipulate a gullible audience.

Is POTUS on that list?

I think they’re programming the ketamine into the LLM at this point

It’s a quote often attributed to Carl Sagan but I think it was around, or a quote like it has been around far longer.

I love the quote too and often remind people about it especially when they want to share information or knowledge that is extreme or not well known.

We do have to question the world and everything and everyone in it … but not to the point where we abandon reality.

I have sat and met with some mid level regional politicians and provincial politicians in the past. They’re all the same. There is something pathological with wanting to achieve a high office and then regardless of your political affiliation (I’m socially left and I always vote and support the New Democratic Party, left of the top Liberal left party in Canada) they all act in the best interests or influence of money and monied interests. I know they have to survive politically to do anything but at the same time, they’ll support monied interests even if it means the suffering of hundreds or thousands of people.

There is something fundamentally wrong with our modern mentality and social conditioning if our world is entirely based on the accumulation of wealth against everything including human comfort or even the right to life.

And that’s not even talking about the political figures who are conservative, very conservative or ultra conservative … they would rather dump entire segments of society if it meant it would advance their agenda.

It’s not fully evil … but it is a lot closer to evil than anything.

Not trusting anyone based on feelings or emotions rather than through knowledge, experience and unbiased information is also a very dangerous thing.

It can lead people down a path towards cults, religions, and authoritarian leaders and movements that have all the “answers” for you.

There is no greater power for an individual to have than a broad range of knowledge and information from reliable vetted, openly available, openly shared and universally accepted sources. If your guru has secret knowledge that no one knows about, chances are that information is either no good or it is unacceptable for a reason.

And also remember “keep an open mind, but not so open that your brain falls out”

I see American and Canadian politicians on TV news every day (I’m Canadian by the way)

The epitome of evil to me is in watching a group of wealthy affluent, influential people doing their absolute best day in and day out to keep their money and the money of those with way too much away from those who need it just to have a little bit of a life. They work to make us all miserable in order for them to keep having everything and to take even more from everyone else who have little or nothing.

The fuck is wrong with Americans?

If any other president had said the things he said over the past couple of months, the country would have exploded and a president either legally or through mass protest removed from office.

What’s so special about this orange nutjob?

The regular Coke is for a bit of sugar for nutrition

The irregular coke is to take the edge off

Surely you can’t be serious

Work hard enough to not get fired

but not so hard that it affects your health or your life

… and this guy doesn’t even work here

and just like Doritos, every once in a while you gorge on a bunch of doritos until you get totally sick of them and swear you don’t like them any more. A month goes by and you start snacking on them again because you hopelessly like them.

Same here … I’d rather be funding the study of an extinct human species … than in funding how to accelerate the extinction of our species

From barbarism to civilization requires a century; from civilization to barbarism needs but a day.

Will Durant

… by our nature we are dumb, frightened, superstitious animals but given enough time, effort, energy and dedication we can overcome our natural instincts of fear and ignorance.

Unfortunately, it is so easy for us to fall back into our old animalistic ways.

People like this are described by Charles Dickens … rich, wealthy, entitled aholes that talk about “The surplus population”

Money has more rights than people

It’s a Plutocracy … a government run by the wealthy or those with money

rather than

A Democracy … a government run by the people

… and now corporate partners have raised food prices on everyone.

The removal of tariffs should allow these corporations to lower their prices but they won’t … because those prices have now been normalized and will never go down. The corporations will take the savings and keep prices high.

That was the reason for the original tariffs … that was the reason for removing them.

They gave corporations tax breaks to save them money … then gave them an excuse to raise prices and funnel even more money into their pockets.

They’re Making American Great Again … for a very small group of really wealthy Americans

I agree but I’ve been surrounded by way too many examples in my life where these arguments and counter points don’t exactly work all the time. If you are a level headed person with a good background, education, self control and generally a good upbringing … then yes, someone on as much painkillers, stimulants and anti-psychotics as you say would be capable of managing all those medications in a responsible way.

Unfortunately, the vast majority of the world is filled with mentally unstable or people whose lives are on the edge of being unstable. There are a lot of dysfunctional and unbalanced people out there.

So when you give these arguments about drugs, they make sense to a very small segment of well balanced and moderately wealthy members of society … but when you apply this logic to the majority of society, these arguments just don’t make any sense.

I’ve known several people that started out with pain killers and opioid medications for real medical issues … only to become helplessly addicted and it was their medications and addictions (that originated from taking those medications) that killed them rather than their initial condition.